Daniela Katseye - PROCESS + final (Patreon)

Hi again patrons,

Before we begin, thank u for all your replies on my last post! I am going to read them all right after this.

This is my final version of my Daniela drawing and I may draw the other girls but time will tell. Maybe I wont.. I wanted this drawing to be very crazy and perhaps give the feeling of the song but ALSO- just be fun. At the end of the day it was really an exercise in rendering a portrait with different textures. I did a few techniques I haven't tried before and experimented with some new brushes.

To start, as I always do, I got my rough sketch:

I put orange under the sketch, and very loosely add flat colors on top. I do this with every single rendered drawing I do because its just a pleasant-to-look-at starting point. I'm throwing down some broad general strokes on her face and chest, areas of shadow and areas of highlight. The reference had pretty low contrast on her skin, so you can kinda be creative with it.

From this point, I focus on getting more accurate colors going, and getting the darker values in the drawing. I experimented with a soft blendable brush that has a pressure-based opacity that would give it a nicer softer finish. I also use textured brushes that have a sort of gradient. I do not like using a very harsh brush on skin because I absolutely hate a vector-art sorta drawing. It might be okay if there's very harsh shadows on the reference.

Now it is much softer. From this point, it's mostly tidying up her face and neck. I added more shadows under her lips and chin, down to the necklaces, and add some more detail to her lips, eyes, ears, and nose.

I then work on the coat since it is very huge and seemed daunting. I decided that we are gonna need to simplify and use texture, so I used a rake brush and the lasso tool for 99% of it:

I started with the darkest color, selecting jagged areas of shadow that I saw in the reference. It's kinda like a bunch of star shapes or big M's. You can see the selections above. I layer on lighter and lighter colors until I get it how I like it, and then I used a chisely brush to add some individual tufts and some redder tones for detail:

You can also see how I did the edges toward her chest, just carving away some shapes with a skin tone and adding some tufts back in. It's so messy but it works like who cares.

Next I started on her hair! This was similar but even simpler. I used a scratchy brush to add a light brown as a base. This is like the midtone I guess! The areas of her hair that were lit. Then, with the rake again I added such loose blocks of highlights with a very light gray.

Then I added a more bluish gray and added even more highlights. I suppose this is pushing the envelope of realistic coloring but I apparently needed more of a drastic effect.

Then I cleaned it up, added those little strings coming down the front, I think they're braids? And cleaned up the hair that was near her clothes. It's really just three different colors of lines down there.

The jewelry and top were very loose and graphic, and I drew the star jewels with just three different colors to show they were reflective. After this, she was done!

I think if you are trying to get some useful information out of this post, it could be very helpful to zoom in on the high res versions at the start of this post. From far away, I think many portraits look super finished or accurate or highly detailed but my whole artistic journey is finding the easiest way to create an effect. I love textured brushes because a harsh edge looks "finished" and a textured brush is a hard brush, it's not a smooth gradient, and relatively high opacity. But when it's broken up and jagged, it can blend like a smooth gradient.

Not sure if that makes sense. But yea I think if you zoom in, you can see that my brushstrokes are all very visible. Perhaps an accurate drawing is more about seeing shapes of colors and putting them where they go and less about insane details.

I added some noise to this portion of the drawing, and made an alt version with a background. Very simply, it was a black background with writing on top! I think I added a halftone effect on the writing. On top of her layer, I added the little stringy starry "GNARLY" banner and added a chromatic aberration effect to it.

Here is what the layer organization looked:

In this version of the drawing, I added a low-opacity pink layer on top of Daniela just to make it fit a bit more with the colors of the background and to add some more contrast. Not sure what blending mode.

I believe that is all!